VIII International Piano Festival
of Oeiras

After finishing her studies at Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa with the maximum classification under the supervision of the pianist Tania Achot, and a master's degree in piano performance at Catholic University of Porto with Filipe Pinto Ribeiro, she continued her musical studies at Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel with Jan Michiels and in Madrid with Claudio Mehner. She obtained her PHD degree in 2015 with “Summa cum laude” at the Escola das Artes of the Catholic University Porto under the orientation of the pianist Sofia Lourenço and the composer Paulo Ferreira Lopes.

She won several national and international prizes, including “Maria Campina” and “Princess Lalla Meryem”, and performed as soloist with the Brussels Chamber Orchestra, as a prize of Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel Competition for students of all instruments. She has played, since 2006, in countries as France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Brazil and China, as well as in the main Portuguese festivals and concert halls, including Dias da Música, Sintra Festival, Oeiras Festival, Mafra Festival, Centro Cultural de Belém, Auditório Ruy de Carvalho, Centro Cultural de Cascais and Olga Cadaval Cultural Center, as soloist and with the leading Portuguese orchestras and conductors.

She is the author of the book "Schumann´s Carnaval: work of genius and madness" (based in her PhD dissertation and with a preface of Professor Mário de Vieira de Carvalho) and has recorded five CDs: "Waltz Transfigured" with works by Schubert and Schumann, “Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 1" with Orquestra do Norte, "Encounter", with works by Mozart and Schumann, "Identity", with music by Debussy, Prokofiev and Liszt and most recent “Terra”, with works by Mussorgsky, Bartók, Albéniz.

Pianist of great originality, Teresa da Palma Pereira has been dedicated, in the last years, to a set of projects that aim to bring erudite music to new audiences, performing several cycles of commented recitals, as "Communication with music", "Classics outdoors", Classics for All" and " Classics in the Bookstore", at Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações, Palace of the Aciprestes, in Linda-a-Velha, social quarters and the bookstore “Ler Devagar”, in Alcântara, respectively.

She´s also the Artistic Director of the Oeiras International Piano Festival since 2018.

Hong-Kong born pianist Tiffany Poon has appeared with orchestras and in recital throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia since she was first accepted to the Juilliard pre-college program at the age of eight where she studied with Emanuel Ax and the lateJoseph Kalichstein.

In February 2024, Tiffany released her debut album on Pentatone, "Diaries: Schumann", which has amassed over 5 million streams and charted at No.1 on Apple Music Classical across four continents.

Recent highlights for Tiffany include her Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin debut performing Brahms’ Piano Concerto, as well as a sold-out debut recital at Dresdner Musikfestspiele. She also made debut performances at the Klavierfestival Ruhr, Rheingau Musikfestival’s KlassikMarathon and the Sèries Jeunes of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich. She collaborated with pianist Louie Lortie and conductor Josep Caballé Domenech at the Moritzburg Festival, and made further debuts at the Herbst Theatre with Chamber Music San Francisco, Munich’s Herkulessaal for the Klassik vor Acht series, and as part of the Washington Performing Arts' Hayes Piano Series at the Kennedy Center.

With a YouTube community of 325k subscribers and over 50 million views, Tiffany is dedicated to building new audiences in classical music through insights into her life as a musician with the aim of making music more accessible for all. She is also the Founder and President of ‘Together with Classical’, a charity which empowers people of diverse musical backgrounds to learn and share their experiences with classical music through online community engagement, grant-giving, interviews and educational videos.

Bertrand Chamayou is one of today's most surprisingly brilliant pianists, recognised for his revelatory performances, which are at once powerfully virtuosic, imaginative and breathtakingly beautiful.

Known for his masterful conviction and insightful musicianship covering a vast repertoire, the French pianist performs at the highest level on the international music scene. He is recognised as one of the leading interpreters of the French repertoire, shedding new light on familiar and lesser-known works, while possessing a curiosity and deep passion for new music. He has worked with composers such as Pierre Boulez, Henri Dutilleux, György Kurtág, Thomas Adès and Michael Jarrell.

In 2019, Bertrand Chamayou won the Gramophone Awards for Best Concerto and Overall Recording of the Year for his album of Saint-Saëns Piano Concertos No. 2 and 5 with the Orchestre National de France and Emmanuel Krivine. His award-winning discography also includes Ravel's complete piano works (ECHO Klassik prize) and Liszt's complete Années de pèlerinage, recorded for Naïve (Choc de Classica; Diapason d'Or de l'année and Album of the Year at the Victoires de la Musique Classique 2012). Chamayou is an exclusive Erato artist.

Chamayou appears regularly at the world's most prestigious concert halls and festivals, such as the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Wigmore Hall, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Lincoln Center New York, Philharmonie de Paris, Berlin Philharmonie, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Suntory Hall Tokyo, Southbank Centre International Piano Series, as well as Mostly Mozart in New York, Beethovenfest Bonn, Lucerne Festival, La Roque d'Anthéron, Edinburgh International Festival and Rheingau Musik Festival.

He has undertaken several important recitals of substantial bodies of work, most memorably Ravel's complete piano works, Liszt's Studies and ‘Années de pèlerinage’ and Messiaen's ‘Vingt regard sur l'enfant-Jésus’. Chamayou also enjoys high-profile artistic residencies in his own right at Radio France, the Gstaad Menuhin Festival and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

A passionate chamber musician, Bertrand Chamayou often performs with partners such as cellist Sol Gabetta, violinists Vilde Frang and Renaud Capuçon, pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and clarinettist Sabine Meyer.

Bertrand Chamayou was born in Toulouse and lives in Paris. He has received France's prestigious Victoires de la Musique Classique award on four separate occasions and in 2015 was appointed Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

After a series of international premieres last year, 2019-20 promises another rich concert season, including performances at Munich Gasteig, London's Wigmore Hall, Paris Philharmonie, Tonhalle Zurich, Gothenburg, Detroit and Luzern. He also realises several projects at the Strasbourg music festival, including works by John Cage for piano prepared with the dancer Élodie Sicard. Chamayou will also make his debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, tour with the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées and appear as artistic director and on the jury of the Long Thibaud Crespin Competition 2019.

Bertrand Chamayou performs with the best orchestras in the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, the Orchestre de Paris, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Wiener Symphoniker, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Montreal's Tonhalle Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Bamberg Symphoniker and NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, among many others. He has had the privilege of sharing the stage with conductors Pierre Boulez and Sir Neville Marriner and counts Semyon Bychkov, Mikko Franck, Philippe Herreweghe, Philippe Jordan, François-Xavier Roth, Tugan Sokhiev, Stéphane Denève and Emmanuel Krivine among his regular podium partners.

One of the world’s leading concert pianists, Angela Hewitt appears in recital and as soloist with major orchestras throughout Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. Her interpretations of the music of J.S. Bach have established her as one of the composer’s foremost interpreters of our time.

Born in 1958 into a musical family (the daughter of the Cathedral organist and choirmaster in Ottawa, Canada), Angela began her piano studies age three, performed in public at four and a year later won her first scholarship. In her formative years, she also studied classical ballet, violin, and recorder. From 1963-73 she studied at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music with Earle Moss and Myrtle Guerrero, after which she completed her Bachelor of Music in Performance at the University of Ottawa in the class of French pianist Jean-Paul Sévilla, graduating at the age of 18. She was a prizewinner in numerous piano competitions in Europe, Canada, and the USA, but it was her triumph in the 1985 Toronto International Bach Piano Competition, held in memory of Glenn Gould, that truly launched her international career.

Angela’s award-winning cycle for Hyperion Records of all the major keyboard works of Bach has been described as “one of the record glories of our age” (The Sunday Times). Begun in 1994, it culminated with her much-awaited recording of Bach’s Art of Fugue in 2014. Her extensive discography also includes solo recordings of the complete Beethoven Sonatas (she is one of very few women ever to record the complete cycle), Scarlatti, Handel, Couperin, Rameau, Haydn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Fauré, Debussy, Chabrier, Ravel, Granados and Messiaen. She has won four Juno Awards, including one for her album of Mozart Concertos with Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra. Other concerto recordings include the complete Bach Concertos with the Australian Chamber Orchestra; the works for piano and orchestra of Schumann with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; and Messiaen’s mammoth Turangalila Symphony with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. She is now recording the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas, and the first of three double-CD albums will be released in November 2022. A regular in the USA Billboard chart, her new album Love Songs hit the top of the specialist classical chart in the UK and stayed there for months after its release. In 2015, Angela was inducted into Gramophone Magazine’s “Hall of Fame”, reflecting her popularity with music lovers around the world.

In 2020 she was awarded two prestigious prizes: the City of Leipzig Bach Medal (being the first woman in its 17-year history to receive the award), and the Wigmore Hall Gold Medal in recognition of some 80 performances over the past 35 years in London’s most prestigious chamber music venue.

During the 2007-2008 season, Angela embarked on her Bach World Tour, performing the Well-Tempered Clavier in 21 countries on six continents. At the same time, she released a DVD entitled Bach Performance on the Piano, sharing her experience of learning and performing Bach with amateurs and professionals alike. From September 2016 to September 2022 (the end delayed two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic) she presented in major cities of the world The Bach Odyssey—performing all the keyboard works of J.S. Bach in a series of twelve marathon recitals—a huge feat which has been undertaken by very few keyboard players. After her performances of the complete Well-Tempered Clavier at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival, the critic of the London Times wrote, “…the freshness of Hewitt’s playing made it sound as though no one had played this music before.”

Conducting concertos of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven from the piano, Angela has led the Toronto Symphony, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the Copenhagen Philharmonic, the Lucerne Festival Strings, the Kammerorchester Basel, the Vancouver Symphony, the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, the Britten Sinfonia, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, the Salzburg Camerata, the orchestra of RAI Torino, the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa in Japan, and in 2019 made her debut playing and conducting Bach with the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna’s Musikverein.

Along with performing a vast amount of the standard repertoire, Angela has also commissioned new works including two piano concertos: the Second Piano Concerto of Dominic Muldowney (premiered with the BBC Symphony in 2002); and in 2017 “Nameless Seas” by Canadian-Finnish composer Matthew Whittall (with the National Arts Centre Orchestra). Canadian composers such as Oskar Morawetz, Steven Gellman, Gary Kulesha, David McIntyre, and Patrick Cardy also wrote pieces dedicated to her. In 2010 she commissioned seven composers from around the world to write short pieces inspired by Bach which were published in a collection (along with several of her own Bach transcriptions) entitled “Angela Hewitt’s Bach Book”. In February 2022 she was presented with The Oskar Morawetz Award for Excellence in Music Performance by the Ontario Arts Council.

Described as “one of the busiest pianists on earth” by London’s Evening Standard (2005), Angela also devotes herself to nurturing new talent. Her masterclasses, both around the world and online, are hugely appreciated, and every few years she gives a week-long masterclass in Italy for gifted pianists. She was also part of Piano Six from 1994-2004: a project which took live music into the remote communities of Canada—giving concerts, masterclasses, and playing for school children across the country. Her writings on music include all the liner notes for her CD recordings as well as several book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement.

In 2005, Angela launched the Trasimeno Music Festival in the heart of Umbria, Italy of which she is Artistic Director. An annual event, it draws an international audience to stunning venues including the Castle of the Knights of Malta in Magione (near Perugia) on the shores of Lake Trasimeno. Seven concerts in seven days feature Hewitt as recitalist, chamber musician, song accompanist, and conductor, working with both established and young artists of her choosing. Involving writers and actors in the programming has been a particular pleasure for her, and she has gone on to perform with many of them elsewhere: with authors Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes in London, Vienna, and New York; and with actor Roger Allam in Venice and at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Her recordings and live performances have featured in such films as The Tree of Life (2011), The Life Aquatic (2004), The Impassioned Eye (2003)—a documentary on Henri Cartier-Bresson—and in 2018 The Children Act (based on the novel by Ian McEwan and starring Emma Thompson).

As an Ambassador for “Orkidstra”– a Sistema-inspired social development program in Ottawa’s inner city, she brings attention to how music can bring children and young adults together through the joy of making music and learning an instrument, as well as how it teaches valuable skills such as commitment, teamwork and tolerance.

Her frequent masterclasses are hugely appreciated. When all concert activity abruptly stopped in spring 2020 due to the pandemic, Angela went online to share daily offerings of short pieces—many of which form the basis of teaching material. Her fans were thrilled, and she was happy to inspire them and stay in touch.

In July 2022 Angela was Chairman of the Jury of the prestigious International Bach Competition in Leipzig (piano category). The upcoming 2022-23 season sees her performing with orchestras in Finland, Denmark, Montreal, Ottawa, Victoria BC, Prague, Germany, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in New York. Recitals take her to, among others, Barcelona, San Francisco, Seattle, Vienna, Amsterdam, Cambridge, Leipzig, and the famous La Fenice Opera House in Venice. She will give masterclasses for young pianists at the Royal College of Music, London, at the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance (Nova Scotia), at Northwestern University (Illinois) and the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota. She is also an artist-in-residence at London’s Wigmore Hall.

In 2006 Angela was awarded an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II in her 80th birthday honours. A frequent guest on BBC Radio, she was invited to be the sole live performer in the two hours of classical music broadcast on BBC Radio 3 immediately following the funeral and committal of Queen Elizabeth II on September 19, 2022. In 2015 Angela was promoted to a Companion of the Order of Canada—her country’s highest honour. She was “Artist of the Year” at the 2006 Gramophone Awards, “Instrumentalist of the Year” at the 2010 MIDEM Classical Awards at Cannes, and in 2018 received the Governor General’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Ottawa. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, has seven honorary doctorates, and is a Visiting Fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge.

“It was a positive sensation. The Canadian pianist is one of the reliably mesmerising musicians of the day. You sit entranced…. It would have been more accurate to say I was floating just below the ceiling. She seems to me the complete performer, gifted not only with fingers that imprint each note with a svelte newness and a mind that is not deflected by such precision work from calmly surmising the larger structure, but also with the ability to convey a spiritual seriousness that nonetheless does not exclude an utter charm.”
Paul Driver writing of her Wigmore Hall recital in September 2003 in The Sunday Times.

“An instant link from head and heart to fingertips
What draws the listener to Angela Hewitt… has to do with contact. Most piano performances arrive in translation: the inner musician making a decision, then issuing a command that makes its way through the body onto the keyboard and into the ear. The process alters the results. Ms. Hewitt is one of those rare musicians who seem to get something into their heads and hearts and find it at their fingertips instantaneously. To fuel this leap must require a fund of psychic energy beyond the average capacity. Good musicians are good athletes, not in the muscular sense but in the staying power of their imaginations. This pianist’s resolve to imbue every musical moment with an unrelenting sense of theater would exhaust most of us in 10 minutes.”
Bernard Holland in The New York Times, February 2007

“At the age of 19, Israeli pianist Yoav Levanon already shows tremendous power and maturity”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commented on the young pianist’s impressive appearance at the 2022 Europa Open Air in Frankfurt where he performed Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Alain Altinoglu. The televised concert took place in front of an audience of 25,000 at site and almost half a million viewers worldwide.

Following on from his recital debut at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London in early 2022, the 2022/23 season sees Yoav Levanon perform solo recitals at Boulez Saal in Berlin, Grand Auditorium de Radio France in Paris, Munich’s Prinzregententheater, Settimane Musicali di Ascona and the Menuhin Festival in Gstaad as well as on a tour of the US for the American Friends of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Invitations from orchestras will lead him to the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, Israel Chamber Orchestra and the North Netherlands Orchestra on tour in the Netherlands to include a stop at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

Previous appearances include a solo performance in a “Piano Summit” presented by Martha Argerich at Schloss Elmau followed by a recital at the Piano aux Jacobins Festival in Toulouse and a recital at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. His performance was highly praised in a critic in Diapason: “Yoav Levanon is not only a stunning virtuoso. His assertive interpretative choices already make him an authentic musician, who has everything to become one of the major pianists of this century.”

At the beginning of 2021, Yoav Levanon took part in a filmed project with Daniel Barenboim and soon after he signed an exclusive recording agreement with Warner Classics. His debut album A Monument for Beethoven with the label was released in May 2022. It attracted great attention from reviewers worldwide and garnered many excellent reviews.

Yoav Levanon first appeared on stage at the age of 4 and soon became a winner of his first National Piano Competition in Israel. He won his first Gold Medal at an International Piano Competition in the USA a year later and performed on the prestigious stage of Carnegie Hall in New York. Following his orchestral debut with the Israel Chamber Orchestra he went on to take part in the Tsinandali Festival, Georgia, where he played Mozart and Bach Concertos for Two Pianos and Orchestra with acclaimed pianist Sergei Babayan. Later he received the ”Young Talent Award” of the Fundación Excelentia and performed in a ceremony at the National Auditorium Madrid in the presence of Queen Sofia. During 2018 Yoav performed Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2019, Yoav appeared as one of the youngest pianists ever in the festival history of the renowned Verbier Festival and was celebrated a "discovery". His debut solo recital, broadcast globally on medici.tv, gained the largest online audience of any of the 2019 Festival’s events.

Yoav Levanon is guided by top piano professors and musicians in Israel and abroad. He was privileged to take part in the ‘Piano Program for Outstanding Young Pianists’ at the Jerusalem Music Center, working with the prestigious American concert pianist Murray Perahia as well as working under the guidance of distinguished pianist Sir Andras Schiff in his artist performance studio at the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin.